AMD Radeon R7 260X Unboxing & Review
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,709 words · ~8 min read
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the Corsair carbide air 540 high airflow cube case is great for air cooling or
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liquid cooling check the link in the video description to learn more welcome
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to another unboxing today we've got the Radeon
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r7260x and what this card is if you don't feel like watching the rest of the
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video is basically a Radeon 7790
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but with some more features and with more performance so this is part of
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AMD's new generation of products which they're calling the r7 and r9 series r7
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refers to performance class gpus and r9
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refers to enthusiast class gpus so what is the key difference well one is price
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this sits in that sweet spot between 100 and 200 dollars where you can typically
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get some of the best bang for the buck the other difference is in well
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obviously performance so this card right here is not designed for you know three
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by 1080p ifinity setups or anything like that this is for gaming in modern titles
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at 1080p it has 896 stream processors it
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has two gigs of RAM and it is clocked at 1.1
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gigahertz on the core out of the box
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which is very very cool because it's the fastest stock GPU speed we've ever seen
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out of AMD it's got a typical board power of 115 watts so it's relatively
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low power consumption and that is reflected by the single pci express six
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pin connector on it you can also we'll do a quick tour of the card here where
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you can see that the the stock reference card is going to have a flower style
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heat sink so you can see there's going to be air flow coming from that single
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80 millimeter fan that is going to be
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just pushed down all over the card all over the memory in the vrm the vrm is
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the only part of the board other than the GPU itself that has a heat sink
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directly on it so you can see it's located up here near the front of the
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board it uses pci express 3.0 for
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connectivity although on cards of this caliber it doesn't really make much of a
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difference and on the back we've got the typical AMD layout two dual link dvi
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HDMI and DisplayPort but there's a big difference here AMD has changed the r7
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and r9 series to allow three displays at 1080p 60 hertz running off of dvi dvi
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and HDMI so you no longer need a displayport adapter very cool stuff next
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up we've got the crossfire connector which is present on the 260x and the
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back of the card where we don't see a whole lot there so let's talk about some
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of the technologies that are included before we hand things over to slick to
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tell us about the performance compared to the competition so number one is zero
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core zero core refers to AMD's ability to basically turn the GPU entirely off
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when you're not doing anything allowing you to save power when you're idling or
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not doing much on your computer which let's face it a lot of computers do the
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next feature that at the time of filming this video is completely unique to this
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card is true audio which is a programmable dsp right on the graphics
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card for you guys guessed it audio this allows
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the sound engineers that work on your favorite games to offload that
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processing that would normally be done on the CPU and have it done instead on
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the GPU itself this means that you're going to be able to get much more
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realistic audio effects so in particular convolution reverb is a technique that
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uses what you'd kind of consider to be an image of a room and how sound should
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behave in it so the materials it's made of the shape so that when you walk into
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a dungeon it'll echo and the drips of water will bounce around off the walls
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versus when you walk out it's a much more open feeling experience this has
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been implemented in thief i saw a demo of it and it actually works it's the
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first time we've seen any kind of real advancements in hardware sound for games
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since eax so that's very very exciting
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but right now just this card although guys stay tuned very soon there will be
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at least another card or two with this feature implemented next up is mantle
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this is really to me the big news about the r7 and r9 series of cards because
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they're directx 11.2 cards which is an API so they're also compatible with
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opengl and oh wait but mantle is now a third
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API that AMD wants developers using they want to leverage the experience that
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developers have developing games on the latest generation of consoles the ps4
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and the xbox one to use that same type
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of approach to program for desktop pc
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gpus so what mantle does is it bypasses
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directx and opengl completely forgets
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about those and is actually a completely new way that the game engine can
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interact almost directly with the card at a much lower level this should turn
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into some very tangible performance improvements and i'm extremely excited
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to see where this technology goes but there are some caveats because obviously
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if we have game developers they you know they have to support directx a lot of
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them support opengl and then now mantle and then what if NVIDIA had their own
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and then what if Intel had their own for onboard graphics and all of a sudden
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we've put a lot of extra load on the game devs well let's hope it doesn't go
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down that path but for now AMD's telling
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us that game devs have been asking them for this and in particular because of
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their presence in every next-gen console
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well it might actually succeed so that's extremely exciting there's a new fan
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profile as well as an updated power tune so the fan profile allows much more
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gradual ramp down and ramp up speeds of the fan so you don't hear that
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when the temperatures are sitting on a threshold where it changes quite
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frequently and power tune now accounts not only for GPU clock speed overall
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board power and power consumption but also temperatures so this is much like
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GPU boost 2.0 where you have a lot more granular control of how the card behaves
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with that said overclocking has been simplified somewhat to the point where
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all you really do now is adjust your maximum clock up and then the card will
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run sort of wherever it can you can make some adjustments to the power limits of
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the boards however the temperature limits come in pretty much set to their
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maximums so the only way to really um you know leverage more overclocking
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other than just turning that slider up is going to be to add better cooling to
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your graphics card the raptor app is something that AMD is talking about a
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fair bit which is a way of connecting with other gamers it's platform agnostic
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it allows you to get rewards for playing and most importantly this is another
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competitor for an NVIDIA technology they've had for a little while the
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GeForce experience it allows you to with one button just say look optimize my
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settings for this game i care more about the appearance of it or i care more
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about the performance of it and it'll just figure out what you want and it
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uses cloud-based data sourcing so it collects anonymous data from everyone
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else running the game as well as the performance they're getting and then
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optimizes your configuration based on other people who have similar hardware
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who are running it acceptably finally guys never settle as always
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games come with your card however stay tuned because never settle is changing
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constantly so you're going to want to check out what your card comes with at
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the time without further ado i'm going to hand this off to slit to tell you
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guys about the performance of the r7 260x
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the charts you're going to see here in a moment are going to be quite general they're going to have all the graphics
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cards that i tested today on them but what you should be focusing on is
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the gtx 650 ti boost and the r7 260 x as
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they are the most comparable cards on that chart now one thing to note is that
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the 650 ti boost has been out for quite a while so it's been being optimized for
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a very long time and the 260x is very
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brand new running a beta driver and has not been being optimized for that long
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so we're likely to see the gap closing up a little bit in the future and
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another thing to note is that all r7 260 x's are two Gigabyte now while if you
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have one monitor that's 1080p or below that may not matter too much but if you
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want to personally prepare yourself for what you might do in the future getting
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more RAM on your card is a good idea because the second you add more monitors
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or go to higher resolutions or just general games in the future
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it'll help a lot to have that extra memory on board now as you guys have
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seen in the chart so far it's actually a pretty close fight but there is a little
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bit of differential there so if you liked the video like the video if you
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disliked the video dislike the video and in the comment section what do you think
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of mantle and what do you think it's going to do to the future of gaming be
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